Weltregierung, Weltwährung, Weltreligion

Title of article: Get Ready for the Phoenix
Source: Economist; 01/9/88, Vol. 306, pp 9-10

THIRTY years from now, Americans, Japanese, Europeans, and people in many other rich countries, and some relatively poor ones will probably be paying for their shopping with the same currency. Prices will be quoted not in dollars, yen or D-marks but in, let's say, the phoenix. The phoenix will be favoured by companies and shoppers because it will be more convenient than today's national currencies, which by then will seem a quaint cause of much disruption to economic life in the last twentieth century.

At the beginning of 1988 this appears an outlandish prediction. Proposals for eventual monetary union proliferated five and ten years ago, but they hardly envisaged the setbacks of 1987. The governments of the big economies tried to move an inch or two towards a more managed system of exchange rates - a logical preliminary, it might seem, to radical monetary reform. For lack of co-operation in their underlying economic policies they bungled it horribly, and provoked the rise in interest rates that brought on the stock market crash of October. These events have chastened exchange-rate reformers. The market crash taught them that the pretence of policy co-operation can be worse than nothing, and that until real co-operation is feasible (i.e., until governments surrender some economic sovereignty) further attempts to peg currencies will flounder.

But in spite of all the trouble governments have in reaching and (harder still) sticking to international agreements about macroeconomic policy, the conviction is growing that exchange rates cannot be left to themselves. Remember that the Louvre accord and its predecessor, the Plaza agreement of September 1985, were emergency measures to deal with a crisis of currency instability. Between 1983 and 1985 the dollar rose by 34% against the currencies of America's trading partners; since then it has fallen by 42%. Such changes have skewed the pattern of international comparative advantage more drastically in four years than underlying economic forces might do in a whole generation.

In the past few days the world's main central banks, fearing another dollar collapse, have again jointly intervened in the currency markets (see page 62). Market-loving ministers such as Britain's Mr. Nigel Lawson have been converted to the cause of exchange-rate stability. Japanese officials take seriously he idea of EMS-like schemes for the main industrial economies. Regardless of the Louvre's embarrassing failure, the conviction remains that something must be done about exchange rates.

Something will be, almost certainly in the course of 1988. And not long after the next currency agreement is signed it will go the same way as the last one. It will collapse. Governments are far from ready to subordinate their domestic objectives to the goal of international stability. Several more big exchange-rate upsets, a few more stockmarket crashes and probably a slump or two will be needed before politicians are willing to face squarely up to that choice. This points to a muddled sequence of emergency followed by a patch-up followed by emergency, stretching out far beyond 2018 - except for two things. As time passes, the damage caused by currency instability is gradually going to mount; and the very tends that will make it mount are making the utopia of monetary union feasible.
The new world economy
The biggest change in the world economy since the early 1970's is that flows of money have replaced trade in goods as the force that drives exchange rates. as a result of the relentless integration of the world's financial markets, differences in national economic policies can disturb interest rates (or expectations of future interest rates) only slightly, yet still call forth huge transfers of financial assets from one country to another. These transfers swamp the flow of trade revenues in their effect on the demand and supply for different currencies, and hence in their effect on exchange rates. As telecommunications technology continues to advance, these transactions will be cheaper and faster still. With unco-ordinated economic policies, currencies can get only more volatile.

Alongside that trend is another - of ever-expanding opportunities for international trade. This too is the gift of advancing technology. Falling transport costs will make it easier for countries thousands of miles apart to compete in each others' markets. The law of one price (that a good should cost the same everywhere, once prices are converted into a single currency) will increasingly assert itself. Politicians permitting, national economies will follow their financial markets - becoming ever more open to the outside world. This will apply to labour as much as to goods, partly thorough migration but also through technology's ability to separate the worker form the point at which he delivers his labour. Indian computer operators will be processing New Yorkers' paychecks.

In all these ways national economic boundaries are slowly dissolving. As the trend continues, the appeal of a currency union across at least the main industrial countries will seem irresistible to everybody except foreign-exchange traders and governments. In the phoenix zone, economic adjustment to shifts in relative prices would happen smoothly and automatically, rather as it does today between different regions within large economies (a brief on pages 74-75 explains how.) The absence of all currency risk would spur trade, investment and employment.

The phoenix zone would impose tight constraints on national governments. There would be no such thing, for instance, as a national monetary policy. The world phoenix supply would be fixed by a new central bank, descended perhaps from the IMF. The world inflation rate - and hence, within narrow margins, each national inflation rate- would be in its charge. Each country could use taxes and public spending to offset temporary falls in demand, but it would have to borrow rather than print money to finance its budget deficit. With no recourse to the inflation tax, governments and their creditors would be forced to judge their borrowing and lending plans more carefully than they do today. This means a big loss of economic sovereignty, but the trends that make the phoenix so appealing are taking that sovereignty away in any case. Even in a world of more-or-less floating exchange rates, individual governments have seen their policy independence checked by an unfriendly outside world.

As the next century approaches, the natural forces that are pushing the world towards economic integration will offer governments a broad choice. They can go with the flow, or they can build barricades. Preparing the way for the phoenix will mean fewer pretended agreements on policy and more real ones. It will mean allowing and then actively promoting the private-sector use of an international money alongside existing national monies. That would let people vote with their wallets for the eventual move to full currency union. The phoenix would probably start as a cocktail of national currencies, just as the Special Drawing Right is today. In time, though, its value against national currencies would cease to matter, because people would choose it for its convenience and the stability of its purchasing power.

The alternative - to preserve policymaking autonomy- would involve a new proliferation of truly draconian controls on trade and capital flows. This course offers governments a splendid time. They could manage exchange-rate movements, deploy monetary and fiscal policy without inhibition, and tackle the resulting bursts of inflation with prices and incomes polices. It is a growth-crippling prospect. Pencil in the phoenix for around 2018, and welcome it when it comes.

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http://www.foreignaffairs.org/…of-national-currency.html

benn steil vom rockefeller-club CFR, der diesen bereits erwähnten artikel geschrieben hat, sieht die zeit gekommen für eine goldgedeckte weltwährung im smartcard (wohl eher verichip) format!!!

hier ein audio interview:

http://www.npr.org/templates/d…=&tableModifier=&mtype=WM

mit chaos geht alles eben 2 tick schneller, drum glaube ich, es wird vor 2018 so weit sein!!

The Bank of England has warned financial institutions authorised to use its emergency lending facility that they are not supposed to discuss it publicly.

The warning came after it announced on Thursday that the facility had been tapped for a second time since turmoil gripped global money and credit markets.

On Wednesday, one or more banks borrowed £1.55bn ($3.13bn) overnight from the central bank, reigniting fears that UK banks faced severe liquidity difficulties and sending sterling and money markets sharply lower.

The overnight rate in the interbank market spiked higher to 6.13 per cent, almost 0.4 percentage points higher than the Bank of England’s official 5.75 per cent rate. The pound initially fell 0.5 per cent to $2.0046 against the dollar before recovering ground to close slightly up in London at $2.0160.

But the fears in the market appeared to be groundless last night. It is understood that the lending facility was used for operational reasons and not because a UK-based bank faced a sudden shortage of sterling.

The amount borrowed was large but the circumstances were understood to be of a technical nature. At the end of June other technical problems led to nearly £4bn being borrowed using the same facility.

The Bank of England stands ready to lend unlimited amounts at a rate of 6.75 per cent, one point above its official rate, in a facility that has been used 14 times already this year.

On Wednesday afternoon, the link between Crest, the UK settlements house, and the Bank of England’s electronic settlements system, broke down for an hour, potentially interfering with banks’ transactions. Crest said that it had extended the deadline for settlements by an hour in order to clear any backlog, and had not received any complaints.

Use of the Bank of England’s reserve facility, which goes largely unnoticed in calm markets, has been the subject of intense scrutiny in recent weeks as investors search for signs of financial distress. Last week, Barclays was drawn into an embarrassing dispute with HSBC, its UK rival, after being forced to borrow £314m from the reserve facility.

After the central bank’s warnings to users not to comment publicly, all the UK banks contacted by the Financial Times yesterday declined to comment.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9004…dc-9a3a-0000779fd2ac.html

http://www.cash.ch/movie/talk

"Marc Faber
Mister Doom ist ratlos. Der Crash-Prophet mit Wohnsitz Thailand sieht nur alle 10 Jahre sichere Anlagemöglichkeiten für Kleinanleger. Im Moment wüsste er auch nicht was tun. Seinem Göttikind würde er ein Mietshaus kaufen, damit es von den Mieteinnahmen leben kann. Sehen die Perspektiven für Anleger wirklich so düster aus? Marc Faber wird befragt von CASH-Talk Moderator Daniel Hanimann"

so ratlos ist er auch wieder nicht!!

http://www.eurointelligence.co…e.620+M51e5fb2c2df.0.html

Another Landesbank bites the dust
By: Wolfgang Münchau

Three German financial institutions have filled the traditional news gap during this summer. WestLB, IKB Deutsche Kreditbank and SachsenLB, are all, or partly, publically owned banks, and they suffered severe liquidity problems, partly as a result of exposure to subprime investments. Two questions arise from this fact. The first is: Are German banks more exposed than others? The second question is: is it accidental that these are all public sector institutions. The answer to these two questions is no, and yes.

Germany is not particularly exposed to subprime, not more than the UK and other countries. I bet that we are going to get some very bad news from some UK-based investment banks this autumn. Another country with a significantly larger exposure to subprime credit is China, from where news of problems has barely surfaced. If German banks have a crisis, Chinese banks must be down under.

The more interesting point is whether it is accidental that all the German banks in trouble are essentially publically owned. The German public sector banks enjoy effective protection against default. This is important. Their default-free status is not implicit, as for example similar to the status of the US mortgage institutions Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac. Their protection is guaranteed, and everybody who works for these banks knows it. It is this guarantee that has made investment managers and traders – and their superiors - far more risk-prone than their counterparts in the private sector. Of course, Deutsche Bank has also suffered some losses, but its risk management systems are far more sophisticated than at those provincial banks.

The episode tells us, once again, that Germany has too many banks, and in fact, too many bankers. Most of the supervisory board members of these insitutions are themselves financially illiterate and do not fully understand the ins and out of investments in new financial instruments, such as CDOs or CDS. They have failed to implement proper risk managerment systems – something which a private bank could ill afford. They are the kind of banks that yields few public benefits to society in an age of deregulated financial markets. Yet their bailout is going to cost the German taxpayer a double digit billion heap of euros. I would not exclude a full-blown savings and loan crisis, as big in scope as the US crisis of the late 1980s. The bailout of these institutions will become a persistent nightmare for successive governments.

From a purely European perspective, this crisis is a welcome reminder of how badly the euro area in general, and Germany in particular, needs further banking concentration. The public policy case for Landesbanken has been getting weaker by the decade. Through their subprime adventures, these insitutions now stand discredited. It is time to reduce the public sector involvement in the financial industry, and to allow these institutions to merge and regroup within the private sector. With the strictures of monetary union and the single European market, such a concentration process should not happen at national level, but across Europe. Here I see German banks not as predators, but as prey. The best thing the German public entitites could do now is to extract the highest possible price for the badly managed banks they own. Unfortunately, they seem minded to go the other way, to consolidate among themselves and to form even larger public entities - national champions that are once again “too big to fail”. This kind of merger, as just happened in the case of SachsenLB, is not going to solve a single problem.

The public sector banks are at the root of Germany’s system of managed capitalism – the Social Market Economy. But this root has become increasingly rotten. As this crisis moves from subprime to other categories of credit, expect the pressure on the German financial system to mount.

On London: The real test for banks is still to come
By Neil Hume

Published: September 14 2007 18:34 | Last updated: September 14 2007 18:34

Few investors called the current credit squeeze like Ken Murray. The founder and chief executive of Blue Planet Investment Management, a specialist investor in the financial sector, warned a month ago that the markets turmoil would result in one of the greatest banking crises in decades.

“The credit cycle has turned, bad debts are soaring, banks will go bust and stock markets will fall much further,” he said, shortly after selling half the equities in his portfolio.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/79dc84…tp%3A//www.ft.com/markets

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=AeHWW5gbc0w

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/123961

(IsraelNN.com) US President George W. Bush said a nuclear Iran would mean World War III. Israeli newscasts featured Gog & Magog maps of the likely alignment of nations in that potential conflict.

Channel 2 and Channel 10 TV showed the world map, sketching the basic alignment of the two opposing axes in a coming world war, in a manner evoking associations of the Gog and Magog prophecy for many viewers. The prophecy of Gog and Magog refers to a great world war centered on the Holy Land and Jerusalem and first appears in the book of Yechezkel (Ezekiel).

On one side were Israel, the United States, Britain, France and Germany. On the other were Iran, Russia, China, Syria and North Korea.

US President Bush said Wednesday during a press conference that Iran attaining nuclear weapons raises the risk of "World War III."

"If Iran had a nuclear weapon, it'd be a dangerous threat to world peace," Bush said. "So I told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested [in preventing a nuclear Iran]…I take the threat of Iran with a nuclear weapon very seriously.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Iran Tuesday and slammed the US’s refusal to rule out the use of force against Iran’s nuclear project. "Not only should we reject the use of force, but also the mention of force as a possibility," he said.

Russia has blocked tougher UN sanctions in the UN Security Council, where it has veto power. The Russian president asserts that there is no evidence Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons rather than a peaceful nuclear power program.

Israel’s Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni called for a new Security Council resolution against Iran at a press conference following her meeting with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice Wednesday. "I do believe there is a need for another Security Council resolution,” she told reporters. “In the past, the need to get everybody on board - including Russia and China - led to some compromises on the nature of the sanctions. I hope this will not be the case this time."

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced Wednesday a sudden trip to Moscow Thursday morning, where he will meet with Putin about Iran. Other topics of discussion will reportedly be Russia’s continued supply of weapons to Syria, which have then made their way into the hands of various terrorist groups based there as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caIgP3Mnb6g

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igTaBT6SAaU

jemand der den goldstandard begrüsst ist ein goldbug für mich, das heisst nicht, dass ich dieses neue smartcard-gold-system begrüsse!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10WoQZKZkNs